GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD AND INTO YOUR FEELINGS!

The longer you stay in your head, intellectualizing about why you pull, you won’t move any closer to healing.  Your emotions are the key to your freedom!  Go into your feelings!

Hair pulling is a metaphor–it’s a signal that you put away your personal power.

You accepted a definition that’s so much less than you deserve. Once you uncover your own hidden belief you will free your power and heal your pulling once and for all. At that point, it won’t be a matter of “if I heal,” it will be a matter of “when I heal.”

The buck stops here, doesn’t it?  Do you know anyone else who really can and will wrest responsibility from your shoulders and create the life that you dream of?  Will they completely live your life for you and through you?  I would call this type of relationship parasitic unless you are hopelessly and helplessly living life as a vegetable on life support.  In my mind, this is the only acceptable excuse one can have for abdicating responsibility for one’s life.

Sometimes taking responsibility is simply about making a different choice.  But when hair pulling is in your life it seems to be much harder to make the choice to accept responsibility for your life.  You may not feel that you have exhausted all the possibilities of an outside answer and are waiting for a magic bullet to rescue you, so you won’t have to do the work that it takes to rescue yourself.  But to heal, you must take responsibility for YOUR problem.

Trich interferes with your whole life, doesn’t it?  But, do you really want to stop pulling?

Take a good look at your life to see if you’ve been rationalizing your compulsive hair pulling even though it seriously interferes with your freedom of choice, your relationships and causes you a great deal of shame and pain.

If your true answer is no then it’s best to admit it to yourself.  You don’t have to tell anyone else.  But, freely acknowledging whatever is true for you, even if the truth is that you’re not ready or willing to stop pulling, is a real and valid step toward healing your trich.

I want to assure you, whatever your position, it is valid.  You have a right to your own thoughts and feelings whatever they are.  Admitting the truth to yourself about your real feelings is a big step toward freedom!

I read an article once that stated that the difference between a “champion” and an ordinary performer was the number of thoughts that each one had during a given day.

The author made a point of stating that the champion’s performance was not based on the content of those thoughts but simply that champions seem to have less thoughts and seem to hold each thought for a longer period of time.

This is an interesting (and controversial) popular notion these days. Is it the “quality” of our thinking that or is it the “quantity” of thoughts that we’re thinking that produces greater results?

How does this relate to your thoughts on hair pulling? Are your thoughts the reason why you pull?

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. -Bertrand Russell

We all struggle at times to see the magic that is right in front of us. It’s time to slow ourselves down and discern where the magic is. Our wits can never grow sharp if we’re buzzing around trying to make it happen. Rather take today to grow your wits a bit and see if you can spot the magic.

This goes double for those who deal on a daily basis with addiction and compulsive behaviors because rather than slowing down they fill their time with mind or emotion numbing things. For those with compulsive hair pulling, for example, it’s more important to find that “perfect pull” than to slow down, feel your feelings and allow them to exist within you. But it’s only in doing so that we begin to spot those magical things that are waiting for us.

Because my work with hair pulling students involves hearing stories of those suffering with compulsive behaviors, I often see patterns from early family climates and our culture as a whole. And that gets me to thinking about all the pain in the world and how to solve it. Occasionally, I come up with an unusually creative idea. Here’s one I’d like to share with you.

What if, beginning tomorrow and from that day on, each and every child popped out of the womb with the words “Worth Protecting” on their foreheads? And what if as that child grew the words grew crisp and clear along with him. Each child would look at the next and remember that another person is worth protecting. Each adult would look at each child and every other adult and know that we are all worth protecting. Until the day when the entire world population would live in the core fundamental conviction that “We are ALL worth protecting!”

Think about it.

Throughout our lives strain and pressures are imposed on us.  They come in the form of relationship moments that are difficult or make us feel uncomfortable, pressures at school or on the job, family traumas, illness, and more.  Hair pullers often report that it is stress that is the reason for their hair pulling, but this is not true.  It is the way that you perceive and deal with these stresses and what you tell yourself they mean about you that is the problem.

The key to dealing with things or events that cause you stress is not to unnecessarily shield yourself from them, but to be able to remain calm and centered in the face of them.  No one can control life, but hair pulling is a way to attempt to do so.  In other words you’ve become trapped in your own trap; jailed in your own cell.  Now it’s time to release yourself from the cell and to create a safe haven for yourself in the midst of freedom.

In these times of worldwide economic difficulties, disaster predictions proliferate.  We’re told, “the end of the world” is upon us.  Doom and gloom are in the air.

Watch out . . . if you are a trich sufferer this is only adding to your stress.  And we all know what more stress means for hair pullers; more piles of hair and eyelashes hitting the floor.
[Read the rest of this entry...]

In an ideal world every person is a fully connected being–the internal voices are so well-integrated that whatever aspect of a person is best suited to handle any given situation arises to deal with it.  In that world your inner voices would be connected in a constantly flowing and fluid dance.

But, the inner hair puller world (and the inner world of most people) does not match that ideal.  For hair pullers, like other compulsion or addiction sufferers and those in present and past emotional pain, it’s likely that just one or two voices/aspects are in power.  These “top dogs” quell and squash the rest of you into compliance.